Saturday, 10 January 2015

As
societies become increasingly multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious,
if we accept the idea that people have a right not to be offended, we will end
up with a tyranny of silence, for almost any speech may be deemed offensive.

Flemming
Rose, The Tyranny of Silence

Like many people
interested in the coming clash of civilisations – to quote Samuel Huntington –
I became aware of Charlie Hebdo in
2011, when their Paris
offices were fire-bombed by Muslims in retaliation for the satirical paper’s
decision to print cartoons originally published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. The next time I was in France, I
bought a copy. Even with my limited French, the language was not too demanding,
although the paper itself was rather childish, Leftist and unsophisticated. Private Eye, for all its goonery, is far
more mature. But Charlie Hebdo has
done what must be done with increasing frequency by dissidents everywhere; it
has mocked Islam.

Our political class
will oppose this ridicule using the strongest means at its disposal in order to
maintain its apparent (although unreal) love affair with Muslims. As the
supreme race-hustler and community activism pimp Barack Hussein Obama put it;
the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But the
future must belong there, or there will be no future.

It is no coincidence
that the two foreign cultures most deleterious to the white West – Muslim and
black – are also the two most sensitive to mockery, criticism and satire. It is
acceptable for blacks to be ridiculed, for example, as long as it is Chris Rock
who is doing it. If you can find Chris Morris’s spoof interview with the
bumptious Darcus Howe many years ago, you will see a perfect example of a black
man affronted by the japery of a white man, a light mockery neither accepted
nor understood. Mocking Islam, however, as many others than just the decimated
staff of Charlie Hebdo have
discovered, may earn you more than just black looks from Diane Abbott.

It is a measure of a
human being’s emotional maturity that he or she can accept criticism and
mockery with good grace, dignity, and an eye to self-improvement lest the
comments aimed at him or her contain truths. In cultural terms, it is a sure
sign of the immaturity of a race or religion if it responds violently to
ridicule or satire. Thus, we have to ape our political classes, benevolently
racist as they are, and treat of Muslims as though they were particularly
unpleasant children.

Watch the way children
respond to being twitted and made to look silly in front of other people,
particularly other children. They do not like it, and you are guaranteed a
response. Thus it is with Islam. But where they differ from children – and we
recall Rousseau’s observation that, if a child could, it would destroy the
world – is the desired outcome of their aggravated effrontery; control.

Control is a
fascinating and all-pervasive concept which will rise to the surface as the
twilight of Western civilisation deepens and darkens. Along with its
provisional wing in the offence industry, the race hustlers and civil rights
organisers and social justice activists, the modern seekers of control have a
sophisticated and nuanced grasp of just what control is.

The journalist
kneeling in the desert in his orange jumpsuit – mocking Guantanamo as it does
(never think Islam does not like to mock) – knows about control, about the
boundaries of what one can and cannot achieve as set in place by others who do
not share your goals or beliefs. The thousands of women, Muslimas mostly, raped
in half by Boko Haram are aware of the niceties of control. Theo van Gogh,
descendant of the painter and director of a film critical of Islam’s treatment
of women – a treatment which produces a deafening silence from the disgraceful
and pathetic sluts who nowadays call themselves feminists – was almost
decapitated, and left with a warning note pinned to his body, during his
masterclass in control, freely given by a Muslim of the Maghreb. Control, then.

Islam seeks to control
the West by an attritional process of shutting off its freedoms, beginning with
freedom of speech. Although not genuinely offended by images of the ‘prophet’,
the paedophile warlord Mohammed, the maintenance of offence works on the
Western Liberal conscience in a way that mere anger cannot. And Islam has a
powerful fifth column active in the West, one which already controls the media,
politics and, increasingly, the law of the land; our genuine enemy, the
cultural Marxists of the Left.

Islam is not to blame
for faux sensitivity to what it perceives as idolatry; the Left is. Muslims
have merely reaped what the Liberal Left has sown. In a country with a rich
satirical tradition, where clubs were threatened with closure if even a
particular anti-establishment gag was repeated, the Left betrayed us. This
betrayal is summarised by Humphrey Carpenter in his fabulous book That Was Satire That Was, as he
considers the stand-up comedy boom of the 1980s;

‘It might seem [from
Alexei Sayles’s act] that the motto of alternative comedy was “anything goes”.
In fact it was always left-wing, and strictly governed by political
correctness, with a particular ban on any material that might be thought racist
or sexist.’

Is it acceptable to
you that the great British tradition of political and social satire defeated
the office of Lord Chamberlain, with his censorious green pen, only to have him
replaced with a gaggle of low-IQ imams and their armed accomplices deciding
what can and can’t be said? You are certainly not Charlie Hebdo. If you have children, and your liberal-left beliefs
force you to believe that no one has the right to offend, your offspring are
not going to thank you for the world they will have to live in.

Thursday, 1 January 2015

I’ve always been right-wing.
It’s difficult to say why, but not being a political thinker I suppose I
identify the Right with certain virtues and the Left with certain vices. All
very unfair no doubt.

From an interview with Philip
Larkin

Soon it will not matter
whether you are Right or Left, as long as you are part of the resistance.

Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism

The central tableau of
Raphael’s beautiful School of Athensshows a conflict in a detail. On
the left, the aged Plato points to his heaven of ideal forms while, to the
right, Aristotle (Plato’s Academy student whom he nicknamed nous, or ‘the Mind’) gestures that
reality is bound to earth. In times which will never return, S. T. Coleridge
was able to say that every man was born an Aristotelean or a Platonist, and
that distinction would have had meaning for the cultured Westerner. Today, in
the twilit West, this esoteric nicety has no meaning to any but antiquarian
specialists in philosophy.

Before the political
distinctions between Left and Right become as outmoded as that between
Raphael’s duo, a note on what remains of the polarity of political difference.

From its origins in the
French Revolution to its current state of definitional bemusement, the
Left/Right division could be reduced to a basic set of components:

·Moral agency

·Fiscal responsibility

·Societal hierarchy

·Cultural quality

Briefly and provisionally,
the Left and Right might be said to differ concerning these components in the
following ways:

Moral agency. While a Leftist
believes that, for example, crime is caused by poverty, a Rightist holds that
each criminal is free to make an individual moral choice as to whether or not
they break the law. This is the classic battle, in philosophical terms, between
free will and determinism. A famous example of this conflict is the argument between
Martin Luther and Erasmus.

Fiscal responsibility.
Broadly, a Leftist would approve of higher personal taxation allied with a concomitantly
larger role for government, while a Rightist would prefer lower taxation and
smaller government on the basic principle that individuals are less profligate
with their money than the state. This schism aligns with a command-control
economy on the one hand, and transactional laissez
faire economic practice, or the
free market, on the other.

Societal hierarchy.
Simplistically, a Rightist will hold that there is a hierarchy pre-existent in
nature, and that this is properly expressed in various social striations, while
those of the Left believe that any social difference is the product of
exploitation and artificial inequality and can be righted by a programme of
social justice and egalitarianism

Cultural quality. Again,
reductively, a Rightist will believe that there is a hierarchy of quality
concerning the products of a specific culture, and even between different
cultures, whereas a Leftist will believe that all cultures, and all cultural
phenomena, are of equal worth, and that to hierarchise is to be ethnocentric,
or to judge from one’s own perspective as though that were privileged.

Personally, although I am a
creature of the Right according to the above codifications, I have always felt that
there is or ought to be a tertium quid, a
third category. Although the laissez
faire economic market is appropriate for elective purchases, for example, I
don’t believe it works for healthcare. Although I find my country’s legal
system preferable to shar’iah, I think the harsh Islamic legal code is appropriate
for Muslims. Although I believe in moral autonomy, society does indeed remove
choices from us and force us to act in certain ways that belie this freedom.
And, although I believe in limited government, I do feel that large
corporations should pay more than they do towards its upkeep. And so on.

I certainly don’t believe
that either the Leftist or Rightist viewpoint is morally right; morals have no
place here. Using morality – at best an heuristic gauge of reality – to judge
political sectarianism is like trying to use a colour chart to measure a length
of wood. And I’m not bound to say that because I am a Nietzschean; rather, I am
a Nietzschean because I am bound to say that. It is simply a case of which side
wins, a case of kinetics, of force and effect.

How nice it would be, though,
given the demise of the genuine Right and my own vestigial Leftist sympathies,
to find the modern Left were a principled, gutsy, honourable, able, authentic
group of wo/men dedicated to making the world a better place for everyone
according to the principles of reason rather than emotion.

Instead, from the adventure
playground of social media to the uppermost reaches of government, from the
humblest of the Twitterati to the most superannuated journalist, from the
fresh-faced university freshman to the hoary old street campaigner, what a
sorry state the Left is in as twilight grows in the West, as decline turns
inexorably into fall.

What a shower. Narcissistic,
authoritarian grievance-mongers vie with a radically entitled moral bigotry possibly
not seen since the heyday of Catholicism. The perpetually offended jostle with
the politically correct to win the laurels for spotting micro-aggression,
hidden racism, institutional sexism and latent homophobia. The self-haters, the
ethnomasochists, the mea culpists, the oikophobes and the white Western
guilt-mongers, in league with the language monitors and the thought police,
form a shadow judicial system no word, opinion or individual can escape.

And the worst of it all is
that the Left have not only won, but won’t stop whining about it. They resemble
a football team after a crushing 9-1 victory whose manager won’t stop banging
on about how the opposition’s last-minute consolation penalty goal should never
have been given.

Look, Lefties. Do yourselves
and the rest of us a big favour. Get hold of the facts and learn how to
interpret them. Don’t mistake emoting for reasoning. And shut up until you’ve
done that homework. If Russell Brand, Owen Jones and Penny Red are all you’ve
got, good luck with 2015.